Donaldson defies 2020's 17-week data hole to breach eight figures once again

Who needs full-year book sales data? Not Julia Donaldson pictured, that’s for sure, as The Gruffalo co-creator earned almost £11m through Nielsen BookScan’s truncated 36 weeks of Total Consumer Market figures in 2020 (henceforth: TCM36) to extend her impressive streak of 11 consecutive years of earning eight figures or more through the TCM.

The two authors trailing Donaldson in her record run are second and third place in the 2020 author chart: David Walliams is currently on a six-year streak, while J K Rowling has notched up five straight £10m annual totals. (Rowling also has two other four-year runs.) In the past eight years, the bestselling author of the year has been one of 2020’s bestselling trio. Donaldson reclaimed the top author crown for the first time since 2015, ending Walliams’ three-year reign; Rowling ruled in 2016.

As we noted last week, and throughout 2020, we are not playing with a full TCM deck, with the various lockdowns meaning 17 weeks of data is unavailable. The timing of the TCM36 blindspots mean some authors will have been more underrepresented than others: broadly, those whose new titles were out in the spring, or who had big Christmas books, suffered. So it underplays certain sectors like celebrity memoir—Ant and Dec, for example, earned £1.2m through TCM36 for Once Upon a Tyne, and are 149th on the author list. Barack Obama recorded sales of £3.6m, but given the timing of A Promised Land’s release (and its hefty £35 r.r.p.), it probably shifted closer to the £7.8m his better half Michele Obama sold in 2018 with Becoming.

And this chart better serves many authors with deep backlist whose annual totals are not so dependent on their latest offering. Hence the strong years for our top three, but also for children’s stalwarts such as Fiona Watt (8th, £4.6m), Jeff Kinney (11th, £4.1m), Dav Pilkey (17th, £2.9m) and Roald Dahl (19th, £2.4m).

Other legacy brands, alongside Dahl, also did well in TCM36. J R R Tolkien returns to the Top 50 in 36th place with £1.7m chalked up through the tills, impressively 13% up on his full-year 2019 total—and this was without any new product conjured up by the Tolkien estate. Hovering just outside the Top 50 are Enid Blyton (£1.3m), William Shakespeare (£1.3m) and Agatha Christie (£1.1m).
Backlist in general was stronger through the TCM36 than in most years. A sliver under 50% of sales through the TCM36 Top 5,000 last year were generated by titles not published in 2020 (£262m of £528m). That’s a blunt tool for determining backlist—a late December 2019 title such as Pinch of Nom: Everyday Light would, of course, be 2020 frontlist—but typically 55%-58% of Top 5,000 revenue derives from new titles published in that calendar year.

But there is still some new blood here. Booker-winner Bernardine Evaristo makes her first appearance in the Top 50 author chart in 23rd place. It’s all the more impressive as the paperback for Girl, Woman, Other (Penguin) was released in the midst of Lockdown 1.0, yet still went on to shift 279,000 units, with Evaristo earning £2.2m overall. What a difference a few prizes make: the last time Evaristo had a new paperback out, the excellent Mr Loverman in 2014, she sold £16,000.

Women’s Prize-winner Maggie O’Farrell nipped into the list in 48th. O’Farrell’s Hamnet was launched in the first national lockdown, but still recorded £1.4m through the TCM36. Seventy-one-year-old Delia Owens, meanwhile, becomes the oldest début novelist to make an inaugural appearance on the list (sprightly 50-year-old débutant Richard Osman is further up the list). Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing has legs—certainly more than the 10 found on a typical North Carolina crawdad. Since the UK launch in December 2019, the title has never shifted fewer than 3,500 units in a week through the TCM.